Lincolnshire’s Local Offer annual report 2023 provides an update of key developments on the Local Offer website since the previous annual report. It includes feedback from service users and how this has impacted on the information provided.
What is the purpose of the Local Offer?
The Local Offer has two key purposes:
- to provide clear, comprehensive, accessible, and up to date information about the available provision in the local area and how to access it
- to make provision more responsive to local needs and aspirations by directly involving young people with special educational needs and their parents and carers, and service providers in its development and review.
The Local Offer is not simply a directory of existing services. Its success depends as much upon full engagement with the users as it does on the information it contains. Its aim is to meet the information needs of families living in Lincolnshire, as well as supporting professionals who may be directly working with families across the county. Every local area in England must have a Local Offer as per the Special Educational Needs and Disability (SEND) Code of Practice 2015.
Key features of the SEND Local Offer
Lincolnshire’s Local Offer brings together information for children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities and their families.
It has a wide range of information for families, including:
- eligibility for childcare
- where to start with special educational needs and disabilities
- wellbeing advice
- support with education
- preparing for adulthood
- upcoming events with the Lincolnshire Parent Carer Forum
Alongside the Local Offer is the Family Services Directory
The Family Services Directory provides information about available services in your local area such as:
- childcare
- support groups
- charities
- education providers
- children’s centre activities
- other leisure opportunities
Lincolnshire’s Local Offer and the Family Services Directory are both maintained and developed by Lincolnshire County Council.
Co-production
Lincolnshire’s Local Offer is co-produced with a range of stakeholders. There is an active working group that is made up of partners across education, health and care, alongside Lincolnshire Parent Carer Form (LPCF) and Lincolnshire Young Voices (LYV).
Feedback
When accessing the Local Offer, visitors can provide direct feedback and suggestions about how Lincolnshire’s Local Offer can be improved via the ‘Your Views and Feedback’ page
Within this section, the ‘You Said, We Did’ provides information about all the feedback we have received, and the actions taken to address and improve Lincolnshire’s Local Offer.
For example:
- ‘How to do I create a page? What is a record? How do I advertise with you?’
- Some of the most common questions we receive are around how to use our system and how to advertise. We have created a support and guides page that currently holds a user-friendly guide with both task steps and screenshots.
- ‘I want to tell parents that I work during the holidays, but I don't know where to put it.’
- We have updated the amount of information areas you can fill in and have made sure you have to fill them in to continue.
Specific developments
- we are in the final stages of upgrading the FSD, testing is currently being done, with a view to going live shortly.
- we continuously look at the pages to see if they can be improved or if there is something missing which needs adding. We have added a new social care section, with more information going on it all the time, as services needed are identified
- we have been through all records on the family services directory to check links work and that they are still active organisations. The number of records has been reduced from over 5000 to less than 2000
Current priorities
- make new FSD live
- review our Local Offer against other areas to check we are not missing things and that ours is as current as it can be
Who has been looking at the Local Offer?
The graphs show data relating to the use of the Local Offer page and Family services directory.
The Local offer views for the early part of the year are high. The latter part of both years saw a similar amount of usage. Views per month are consistent, with lower amounts in August and December – tying in with holiday periods. 
The second graph shows the number of hits the Family services directory (FSD) has had, this carries on being consistent over the years, with peaks at times when families start searching for childcare. There are some high number of hits on some days, (particularly December), this is bots trawling the site to index on Google, not something we can separate out. 